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How-to: Dealing witH Defects In his book The Soul of a Tree, George Nakashima wrote that a tree, like a piece of fruit, is most delectable when it’s just on the verge of rotting. Mira Nakashima shares her father’s sweet tooth for wood’s imperfections, and decades of dealing with cracks and rot, bugholes and knots have produced a special expertise at Nakashima Studio. Mira, assistant designer Miriam Carpenter, and shop foreman Jerry Everett explained some of their strategies. Worm holes and bug holes—If nobody’s living in there, a lot of times we let them go. Other times we clean them out and fill them with Plastic Wood tinted with oil paint or powdered pigments to match the wood. For bigger holes, we’ll fill with epoxy, sometimes mixed with sawdust—a trick we learned from Sam Maloof. Cracks—If a crack is stable, we might leave it alone or fill it with epoxy or Plastic Wood. But if it seems likely to run, we’ll stabilize it by inlaying a butterfly key across it. We use butterflies for visual effect, but they are also structural. We’ll sometimes put butterflies on the underside of a top if the cracking is severe or if adding more butterflies on top would look too busy. Knots—If a knot is loose during machining, we’ll remove it so we don’t lose it up the dustcollection chute, and then epoxy it in afterward. If a knot is missing or too damaged, we’ll sometimes find a matching knot and shape it to fit the knothole. Rot—We do our best to slice away rot or dress down a board to remove it. But if necessary, we treat it with Rot Fix, an epoxy that penetrates soft fibers and hardens them up. Cupping—If a big slab is cupped, we’ll cut kerfs along the grain on the underside to relax it and then attach a couple of cleats to pull it flat. To cut the kerfs, we set the circular sawblade to about threequarters of the thickness of the slab. When a small board is cupped, we’ll sometimes put it outside on the wet grass, convex side up toward the sun. That warps it toward flat, and we can screw on some cleats to hold it there. Whatever defects we’re dealing with, it helps to remember that a lot of times, the pieces that look most hopeless in the shed turn out the best once we’ve got them finished. www.finewoodworking.com January/Febr uary 2013 55